Draft

The danger to life when writing

He who writes, reads. One requires the other: a truism. But it’s not always the case that you write what you read. The reading process itself is a writing process, at least if you can read. What sounds like a provocation is not so outrageous, because reading creates a space of thought in the reader that was not intended by the author, of which he will never be aware, because the author will never be a reader of his book, but only of others. The author is therefore excluded from reading, even if this blockade only concerns his books. The writer opens a space of thought that he knows from reading, and then he dips his pen and draws on paper what he recognizes when reading purely without his hand. Everyone senses the danger of writing from the very first moment. Most ignore it, others allow themselves to be driven by this danger. This mortal danger will bring them to mastery.

Booffoonery

In front of a shelf of the dead

I could sing of the ominous and threatening things, the dead and forgotten. But will I ever travel again through the fog of oblivion, tinted yellow by madness, to the shores of a strange reality? Will I ever find my way back, which seemed as coincidental to me back then as Rip van Winkle once wondered about the emergence of a Flemish society? No decades were stolen from me by a strange liquor, not even years, but I could also tell you about the strange festivities in the depths of the fateful Mons Vereneis. However, I would never be able to say what was mixed up with my hallucinatory dreams because one thing has become clear to me: There are different types of nocturnal spinning, and at least one of them opens up the infinite vastness of the afterlife to us. It is not at all impossible to me that, as soon as we leave our stable star system, we could also end up outside our diligent sleeping activities simply because we would not be allowed to keep our bodies and would die. In other words, everything we need in our world would die and, if we lost it, we would wander around unable to continue dreaming because, in such a state, we would simply consider all our memories to be dreams. We need the protective shield of matter so much that we fear losing it more than anything else. Perhaps this is why we fear ghosts. They show us that even in death, we cannot escape and must continue playing endlessly. Through their sinister appearances, they demonstrate the importance of repetition and how everything repeats itself until the concept of eternity is realised.

Sometimes you want to make up a story, only to realise that it’s true. The same applies the other way around. A memory that you swear is true turns out to be false. Then there are the mixed ratios in various gradations. We will never discover what reality truly is, and the secret of fiction has long been shrouded in mystery. I remember my life as if it were a story I had read. There was a time when I was dreaming alongside the surrealists in Paris, and perhaps they had heard of me decades before I was born. In 1990, I read their notes, pamphlets, and manifestos to see if I was listed anywhere. But then I remembered that I had been given a different name long before I was born. At least I didn’t hear anything about the person I knew myself to be. You wake up and stand in front of a shelf of the dead. All that remains of them is your interpretation of their thoughts.

Booffoonery

Morena

From the moment we met, Morena struck me as a woman of unearthly Beauty. It should come as no surprise, then, that she had not yet been married, despite being in the prime of life for a woman and being able to look back on an ancient family tree. The stories that were told about her beauty were strange, and the first serious advances were probably not made out of fear, as those in the circles surrounding her knew very well that one always had to face up to the ancestors who had once made the family great. Woe betide anyone who does not prove themselves worthy, who hesitates when it comes to pushing forward, or who, conversely, tries to fill an entire breach on their own full of arrogance.

I was neither of the one nor of the other kind and was probably listened to by her because I neither stormed and pushed nor showed the usual fear of her aura. In her presence I was always gripped by a power that enabled me to scale philosophical heights and to parley about Jakob Böhme, for example, who was a favorite topic of discussion at these societies at the time, as if I had ever been a studious and had not only read the Aurora, but understood it. Morena then gave me looks that urged me to continue to speak so boldly about the alchemical-poetic style and to pursue the idea of contradiction as a necessary moment. I often spoke like this in front of her and had no idea that I was conjuring up the very thing that most people were afraid of.

On the mirror bulging out of the wall was the justification for my suspicions, which perhaps I shouldn’t have voiced until a little later.

“I never had…” This thought had never been spoken, my drooping mouth could not have curved around the intended words. So I remained silent.

I had left her standing in the bird of prey enclosure, unable to decide whether to approach her or not, while I watched her kiss a burnt angel. But that wasn’t why I was watching her, hiding behind a feathered tree. My eyes might not be welcome, and if not my eyes, then perhaps her gaze.

It was her bandaged arms that made me curious (to tell the truth, I didn’t recognize the angel until much later), and not least her breathing apparatus, which stuck out of her face like a radar trap. I didn’t know her then.

When I met her again later, I noticed her treacherous dress. She no longer had her mask with her and her arms were free of wounds that would have made a covering necessary. Only her dress and the burn marks on it. On the table in front of her was a plate of small, oil-fried fish – sprats, to be precise. The exit wasn’t far, but you always had to walk through a fast food restaurant to get to it. The door only opened when you had bought or eaten something (whether you then left it lying around or threw it in the bin — there was only one bin, so it appealed to your moral sensibilities — was left to your own strategy).

I didn’t speak to her, of course, but I sauntered over to her table and grabbed the breast that was on my side. If she had still been wearing the mask, I wouldn’t have dared.

Her plate shattered on the barren floor and the fish slithered across the water as if they were in a hurry to find their way back to the sea. But they didn’t find it, just scattered the oil and stayed where they were.

I can’t say exactly what happened next. Only now do I remember the crumbly remains of her eyelashes that she left in the sink, a salted sole in the fridge. I look at her handwriting on the mirror again: “I never had …”

What did I want to ask her?